


La Salvezza

by Aphoride



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (sort of), Anger, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bitterness, Canon Gay Character, Canon Gay Relationship, Community: HPFT, Community: grindeldore, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, M/M, Nurmengard, Redemption, Religious Themes, Roman Catholicism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-12 22:52:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7952374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphoride/pseuds/Aphoride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. </p><p>- Dante Alighieri</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inferno

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StellaBlue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellaBlue/gifts).



Inferno  
  
Do you remember, my Albus, that day we tested the limits of right and wrong, light and dark, good and evil – that day they blurred and stuttered, so everything around us was neither one nor the other: instead a mesh of dove-grey and charcoal-white, silver glinting in your eyes and on my hair. All I could hear was your heartbeat laid over mine, the harsh, nervous sticks of your breath loud in the quiet, ghosting over my mouth in turn in a feather-light, tender caress.  
  
Do you remember the flames when they roared – the way they screamed high and bright, incandescent and preternatural, the ghosts of fires which once swallowed cities whole? A waterfall of colour, from apple green-diamond at the tip, to heavy, jealous deep green, so deep it sank into the water of the stream below it, carving out a divot for itself: they were the aurora borealis recreated, replicated in coils of magic-laden fire, dancing and flickering, though weaker, always weaker, and stranger, eerie and silent.  
  
Do you remember?  
  
Oh, but you will lie on these things; I know you will. To truth then: I know you remember this, all of it, from the moment the thought flashed across the air between us, to test the theory – and such a theory it was! – to create a test, to perform it. We were young, we were immortal; consequences were for hindsight, then, for fear and nerves and a thousand and one other things we shed when we stepped into each other’s company.  
  
I know you remember it, and I know you remember more, that you remember all the rest of it too: the scent of blood in the air, thick and metallic, the pressure pooling around us, heady and inviting, lustrous and glittering in ways we had not predicted. How you kissed me, even as the blood still dripped slowly from between our fingers, our hands not yet parted; how the want and the thrill power gave us turned so easily into something else – how the flames grew higher, purpling and reddening, with every press of our bodies, every gasp and every slide, slick and frantic, of hips.  
  
It was profane and yet so holy.  
  
God and acolyte – we played each part in turn for the other, worshipping and worshipped, and we birthed stars that night, between us.  
  
Then, we burned together and it consumed us whole, trailing fingers up our arms and across our backs like lover’s hands, seeking out dips and valleys, nooks in our skin to bury in and to gather their strength, solidify into a mass of yellow-orange, black lines of smoke above, which would swallow us whole, leaving us with ash in our mouths, coating our legs and arms with streaks of grey, stamped here and there with fingerprints, proofs of ownership, of possession. We would laugh in the aftermath, breathless and sated and delighted beyond measure.  
  
Now, I sit here and burn alone, Hell’s maw opening beneath me even as I waste away in this godforsaken prison, alone with only my thoughts for company – would you prefer I say conscience? Albus, my Albus, I loosed that a long time ago, you know this, and it has saved us both in times – and it eats at me, leaving me angry and quiet in turn, and always, always damned.  
  
It is strange that, after having searched so long for immortality, I cannot determine if I am afraid or merely expectant of what will happen next. Some days, I am my father’s son: logical, calm, sleeping away the hours until the reaper comes to cut me from this world with a surety based on nothing; other days, I am my mother’s son: passionate, deferential and desperate for a glimpse of the forgiveness and salvation I have not earned but want all the same.  
  
Sometimes, I hear words slip past my lips, leaping off my tongue with gentle, paternal touches, and I think of you, of my sins and my faith, and I love and loathe all at once.  
  
_Pater noster, qui es in coelis…_  
  
The words bite, pulling at the skin on my lips and face, driving deep into the flesh of my tongue and scratching down the length of my throat, sinking into my stomach and curling, curling so that I wince and must stop, some wretched emotion taking me prisoner. It tastes of bile and salt, of blood and ash, and, faintly, of laudanum and absinthe and all the excesses of youth.  
  
What I would give for some now – for a single taste, a mouthful, just enough to remind me that there is something in this world of mine other than grey and pink and the white of my hair. To remind me that there is more than empty, grey space and endless circling round and round and round the same handful of thoughts, each time more scattered and broken than the last; to remind me that there are pleasures in life, beauty and light and gaiety, even if not for me.  
  
It would be worse, though, when I think of it like that: it makes my chest constrict until my heart thuds dully, loudly, afraid and cramped beneath my ribs as they scream and creak inwards. It would be so much worse to remember freedom – how it tastes, how it smells, how it felt when it weighed on my soul and my mind – and then, that constant follower, to remember that I am forever denied it.  
  
(Denied it by you – and oh, that hurts almost more, that you should have the audacity, the nerve, the endless sickening humility to imprison me here and deny me what you know I want the most, crave the most even as your halo wanes in the sunshine, water-thin and beginning to drip.  
  
You know it will break me, it will drive me mad and make me beg faster than anything this world could ever do to me, you know this better than anyone ever has done – now, you are the only one alive who knows this – and still you hold the key and tell me _never_.  
  
_Atone_ _first_ , you say, with your silences and when you send Fawkes to me, a silent watchman on the windowsill, his claws leaving tiny scratches in the stone, _atone_ _first_.  
  
Have you atoned, Albus? Have you atoned – or do you not need to do it, is it only reserved for monsters like me, those who bend the world until it breaks and have the pieces falls through their fingers every time they try to rebuild it?  
  
Then again, you have your prison already, your chosen punishment in your beloved Hogwarts; I hope it suffocates you, leaves you weak and trembling so that you fall to your knees and crawl to the door like I do, that you press yourself against the bars so the indents last for days just to get as close as you can to life, to the wide expanses of freedom beyond the walls like I do. I hope it will kill you – like Nurmengard will kill me.  
  
You would not be surprised if I told you this; you would not be surprised if I told you that I hate that, hate it, hate it, hate it. You would be surprised if I told you that I know why you did it, and I still hate it.  
  
My Albus, did you expect absolution from me?)  
  
The words bite at me – or I bite at myself, rubbing skin between my teeth until I taste copper, I am never certain these days. They bite, though, with the hiss of shame and regret, the roar of anger that I should not, should not have to, and the tender, burning promise of salvation.  
  
It is a promise and it is a lie: I shall not be saved, I cannot be saved – we have both known this for a long time.  
  
Still you try, though, to force it out of me, to bend me enough that it would appear, and you wait so very patiently for it to happen, sitting in your tower on your cushions and by your fire, as though by merely wanting it, it will appear to you if only you give it time.  
  
In isolation you have grown arrogant, Albus, demanding the world; a true dictator – I am proud, touched that this is how you remember me, remember us, remember yourself.  
  
Most days after I start to say them, those words from another life of mine – when I am weak and cold and lonely, when I fall back on those hours I spent kneeling on stone as a child, my hands clasped in front of me, my lips reciting words which were engraved in gold on the back of my memory in those days I did not speak a word of German – I do not finish them. I let them hang in mid-air, patient and serene, and abandon them.  
  
Instead, I fall back onto my bed, my bones clattering as I hit it, and stare up at the ceiling, the world recalibrating itself around me so that I am safe again, locked away inside the prison and inside my own head, certain once again.  
  
Tell me, what makes something right? Is it that it is good, that it is worthwhile, that it is generous or kind or virtuous in any way? Is it that it is something simply not bad, or something where the bad and good negate each other; where the bad is less than the good, so the good triumphs in the end? Is it ‘right’ to try something, even if it might fail, even if it does fail, even if in failure it causes harm – on the grounds that it might also succeed and the success would be right?  
  
Are you allowed, before God or Allah or your own, Zeus-like conscience, to try and say that it counts for something in the end, that you tried?  
  
I am not asking if you have done it, if that is the philosophy you write for yourself (I know is not – if it was you would no longer feel guilty, and you would visit me then, yes: free of your burdens, allowed to enjoy those pleasures you forbade yourself from touching in your penance), merely if it can be said or thought.  
  
People have such ideas about guilt and atonement, after all, that you should do this or say this, that such things can cleanse the body and mind and soul of the stains of the sin long committed. I, in turn, have sins and so atonement lingers in the corner of my cell with the damp and the cold.  
  
Do you like that idea? That I think on atonement often? That I know I have sins, that it is believed to be possible to earn salvation before you die?  
  
Do you want me to be guilty, Albus?  
  
Oh, but you should know me better than that – you should remember our plans better than that.  
  
I am not guilty, not yet; your tricks and your silence, your hopes for penitence and absolution have not reached me yet. You may sit in Hogwarts playing teacher and mentor and kind, benevolent elder, but I am the last of my kind, the last of Nurmengard’s children and even you cannot breach her walls.  
  
Instead, I am angry. I see the granite of my prison walls and I see military grey, dove-grey, edged with black and silver, the red and gold of my Germany in the background, in the curtains and on the flags which stir every now and then in the corners of the rooms. I can feel the collar around my neck, the gloves on my hands and the heavy weight of the cloak, lined with white fur, clasped with threaded platinum, tumbling down my back to the floor.  
  
I remember, then, all that I was and all that I could have been – that we could have been, that our world could have been.  
  
(Would we have been happy, together – powerful, beautiful, immortal? Would you still have loved me; would you have loved me again?  
  
Questions, there are always more questions… and I will not be the first to ask them; in this, you can break first. I will not.)  
  
My mother once told me that sins eat away at us from the inside, poisonous acids slowly burning their way through our flesh layer by layer until they hit the surface, bursting free in a shower of yellow and red, hot to the touch and smelling of death; a fair façade might hide it for a while, but nothing can cover it when the pressure breaks through, marring and scarring as it goes.  
  
A fire is lit underneath sinners, she told me and my sisters – not my brothers, I do not think, not them, they were groomed from the first for war and for violence, for death – and it stretches down into Hell itself, from where all foul, smoke-salted things come. That is how you know them: by the scent of smoke, the sizzle of their skin when you touch them and the screams they will give when finally their hour of reckoning comes.  
  
Superstition, as so much is – though not as all stories are; once, we prided ourselves on having found the fine distinction, a hair’s width and delicate as a spider’s string, between truth and fable – but it is one which lingers at the back of my mind, festering quietly and seeping until I wonder on it.  
  
Do you think there could be something in it? That after all those sins – the countless deaths, the blood staining my soul black and the endless submission to desire, to mindless, aimless pleasures – there is a way to see it on the outside, to sense it; some way the soul marks it on the body, a sign to say _stop_. _Do not come closer. I am damned._  
  
I wonder if you would – and then I do not wonder any more. I know you, though you pretend I do not, that we never met and never swore ourselves to each other in blood and fire and ecstasy newly learned, and I know you would not.  
  
You do not believe in life beyond death, in Heavenly retribution and eternal damnation; you are half English and half Indian, and so dutifully you are half God-fearing and half mystic.  
  
Ah, but what is the use? You cannot hear me across the waters from my prison to yours – perhaps if I traced a line across my wrist, slender and gleaming crimson, slid my arm through the bars and let it all drain out, a rust-red trail winding its way across the sea all the way to your Scotland, to your Hogwarts, like a path of rose petals to a lovers’ bed, I could speak a word, just the one, with the last of my strength and light it on fire all the way: a kaleidoscope of emerald and azure, of lavender and fuchsia pink, blending and blurring and merging as they went, swinging and twirling their way to you, bearing…  
  
Bearing what? A message – love, anger, loneliness; or your long-awaited, long-desired absolution from the murder you have hung yourself on nonetheless, accepting guilt where none was offered?  
  
No, you may have this in exchange for your silence: I will offer you nothing, give you nothing except for the smoke and the fire and the creeping, twitching pain you have given me. You want me to be merciful, to cry and weep at the thought of the sins I must bear, the suffering others took in my name, and I tell you now I refuse it all – your prized mercy, your dreams of absolution and salvation, for me, for you, for everyone you impose this on.  
  
I will drag you down with me, Albus, into the flames and the smoke, coughing and spluttering: we shall climb down the ladder together, traipse along the path to the gates of Hell hand-in-hand, as we have always been and done; as we travelled every road together.  
  
You promised to share immortality with me – is this not immortality?  
  
Oh, Albus, but do you not see that this is all that is left for us, relics of an older time and stained as we are? I refuse to give up my sins, to admit to anything other than ownership of them, because they are mine and precious things, memories and lessons I keep close, and you, you have fashioned your own rope out of yours, Ariana’s hair and mine woven together to form a noose nothing can saw through – harder and stronger than bone, more brutal and delicate than china – and so we are doomed by our own virtues.  
  
Confession will not save me. Guilt has not saved you.  
  
So instead of fighting, throwing water and patting sand over the pockets of skin bulging up where the air and the fire press against the flesh underneath, desperate and useless, relax and fall into it, sigh and call for me, pull me close and let yourself remember what it was like to steal from me kisses, breaths, wordless cries, and revel in the safety that nothing then will separate us.  
  
One way or another I will have you with me, I will see you there as we pass through the circles, going deeper and deeper for each sin committed, for each blasphemy uttered.  
  
We burned once, and so we will burn again.  
  
(I know you, Albus, and so I know you will not give up: you will send Fawkes to me again, a sentinel brimming with fire, burning himself – and is that not ironic? – watching always for the first sign of weakness, of shame and guilt and the possible pleas for salvation you think you can give me, that you think I can give you.  
  
On another day I might feel more generous, more wistful and tender towards you, towards the past and your obsession with my soul, but today I am only angry: every part of me thrums with it and I am the conqueror again, the murderer again, spitting sparks and every word sweeping through houses and men alike with red, white-hot fury.  
  
What does it matter to me if you waste your time and your thoughts on me, on this? In silence, you say everything; in silence, in return, I will say nothing.  
  
Try again, old man. If you scream loud enough, I might hear.) 

* * *

**A/N:** the quote used for the summary is from the First Canto of Dante's Inferno, and so is not mine - Dante owns everything, including the inspiration for this story.   
  
The quote used in the summary is from the Latin Roman Catholic version of the Lord's Prayer, and so is not mine either. 'Pater noster qui es in coelis' translates as 'Our Father, who art in heaven' - and the translation of it is not mine either, but comes from the Bible and other Christian religious texts. 

The title is Italian, and translates as 'salvation' or 'redemption', both of which felt appropriate :)  
  
Dedicated to Kristin - a wonderful, wonderful friend, and a lovely person. I hope you like this (and the potential spoilers for L'optimisme are limited in this, I promise! :P)! Thank you so much for all of the help and inspiration and encouragement over the last while, and for being such a great Giftee :) <3 <3 


	2. Purgatorio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lemon, I think, ja?

Purgatorio

I am haunted, Albus, and I am hunted.

Did you know this would be how it came about, the eventual culmination of things? Did you even suspect or simply guess – oh, you and your famous guesses; you do not guess, you progress down a chain of thought, following patterns and links one after another, to call it a guess merely protects you from failure – that this would be my punishment, my suffering?

Did you want this, when you wanted my salvation?

(The two go hand in hand, schatz, there is no other way – and I waver, constantly, between certainty and uncertainty.

One minute I think you must have known, because there is no other option; another I think that you must not, must only have ever suspected, because how could you want this for me, when you do not believe in it, in what it will give, and you know first-hand how it burns and blisters your skin, the lashes whipping deep into your flesh.

High on your pedestal you shout down that I am a monster, that I am worth nothing, not even your hatred, as you pile dirt and earth around me, moulding a grave for me even as I live. Sanctimonious and god-like, the deceit drips from you in a shower of cold, beating rain, drumming into the ground with all the force of stone.

In your bid to be purified you have forgotten your own sins; you look to mine to cloud your own, no?

You are a liar, and you haunt and hunt me in an effort to pretend you have no ghosts of your own, no pelts on your walls.

You lie, and I pray it melts your tongue, sliding down your throat and poisoning, choking you on silver.)

Oh, but what does it matter – I cannot escape it, any more than I can escape you or Ariana or my stiff, silent father; any more than I could run from my mother, from the names they flung at me in Durmstrang. What does it matter if I stand or if I hide, it will find me anyway, and there is nowhere left to run.

It is not bravery, this, and it is not cowardice: it is simply exhaustion.

Over forty years, it has been, since the day you took everything from me, when you wrote yourself into the history books and scratched my name out as you went. Forty years, and in all this time there has been nothing: not a letter, not a word, not even a sound.

Strange, is it not, how sometimes in expecting nothing we still find ourselves disappointed?

Forty years, though, Albus, half our lives again almost, time running away from us and our dreams and the secret circle of willow trees by the brook we used to hide from the world in, and I have been angry, resentful, bitter for each one of them. Thick and salty, the first sweet hint masking the tang of the sourness which is at its heart, it has soaked into my stomach and lungs with each breath and each sip of water I took, every mouthful I ate, until I have coughed it out and pissed it out and sweated it out through every pore of my body.

It circles, though: what I cough out, I suck back in when I breathe, and so it goes on and on, a never-ending chain looping back on itself to keep me forever tense – like a new-made piano, the strings stretched to breaking point and only ever able to play the same handful of melodies over and over again.

Always, it feels like I am drowning in something I cannot feel or see; it is steady and relentless, gently coaxing me to sleep, cocooned like a baby in the comfort of familiarity, rocked to the tender notes of future promises and possibilities, opportunities ripe for plucking; a lullaby of cold, calculated revenge.

I imagine it would be in D flat major, no? Dark and unstable and tragic; suitable enough for the history we share.

There are shadows at night, Albus, shadows which twist and dance – or seem to; I am no longer sure of what is true and real, and what is only my mind taking facts and spinning them this way and that, reforming them to what it fears and wants and remembers – weaving their way along the walls of my cell, thin arms reaching and snapping, but perpetually moving forwards, closer and closer, until I can bear it no longer and I close my eyes, think of fire, of bright red roses and auburn hair falling over my fingers, and murmur a single, sibilant word.

_Incendio_.

(Do you know I can still do magic, that even here where I am chained head to toe within bounds I drew and you pulled tighter, retying the knot so there is no way to undo it – a Gordian knot of your own, made from strands of magic, protecting and commanding, which push at me, dampening the air inside Nurmengard so I feel pressed in on myself, squashed inside a cage I do not fit into.

Do you know if I concentrate, think hard and long enough, deep enough, I can summon my books to me, carve numbers and letters into the wall an inch shallow, but nothing, nothing like what I could do, once upon a time.

Would it bother you if I told you, if you discovered it, or would you be strangely, perversely proud that I had found a way, however small, to best you and the Elder Wand?

You would smile, gentle and knowing, and you would take this from me too, this victory, even though it is petty and childish, meaningless in truth. You would assuage your own guilt and your hungry, begging conscience with a trip of words saying it had always been the plan.

Oh, but you are such an accomplished liar, my Albus.)

With a golden shimmer, sparks roll across the floor, a sea of twinkling, baying stars in silver and bronze and butter yellow, twisting and surging, dancing and licking their way up the walls and onto the ceiling, the floor melting away even as they wrap themselves around the metal bars of the window, sizzling and cracking as it bends, slowly, so slowly, bending and bending until…

It is at this point that I always blink, always, and all that is left is a sputter of sparks, crimson and cardamom, half-formed children and dying all at their first breath.

Weak and exhausted; there is no heart left anymore.

Come now, Albus, what did you expect when you locked me in here?

Perhaps you thought I would repent so easily, falling to my knees the moment my regime broke, my friends dead and my followers scattered, my dreams crushed to a pile of dust in your hand, a breeze lifting them off your palm as you scattered them out across the sea separating us. Perhaps you thought that the enforced solitude would wear down at me, weights on my shoulders, around my wrists, dragging me onto the floor, aching and crying, my mind snapping along with my body – too many names, too many souls ripping at my own, consigned to Hell so long ago.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

Ah, I do not know, you know – I do not know you, I think, if I ever did.

I shall give you this one gift, my Albus: you are right, in part. Something in me has broken on Nurmengard’s back; I am less myself now than I have ever been.

Does that please you? Do you like that what you wish for has come? Are you triumphant at the thought that now, now you have finally bested me, owned me completely – I am broken at your feet, the burden of the world still chained on my back, all of my fire and my certainty and my God-given storm of magic gone to you.

Zeus Almighty in your fury, God in your wisdom, Heaven and Earth are both now yours and yours alone – and how does it feel to sit alone?

(You are alone, I know that at least. There will be no other to replace me; you did not manage before to forget me, how will you forget me now, when my life and my mind and my body are entirely yours, locked under your command, at your whim and wish.

No, I am yours and you are mine – I have that to comfort me, I suppose.

How loved I feel, cocooned in your rotten, tortured gift of life.)

Up here in my tower, a mockery of a princess as I press myself against the bars, my hair limp and tangled in wild, knotted curls, the blue in my eyes and the gold of my hair fading hour by hour, day by day, stolen by the sun as she bleaches me to grey, beating down on me, fierce and bright. While I squint and burn, the wind takes my thoughts as they come to me, plucking them from my mind with quick, darting fingers, apples from low-hanging boughs.

We were thieves, once upon a time – raspberries from the market, the juice staining our fingers in a weak, watery foretelling, and stories, rhymes and myths from other ages, shaping them and retelling them. Other, slipperier thefts too: innocence and discovery, taking pieces of dreams from each other for our own and slotting them in place for ourselves; thefts which were almost gifts.

Did I steal more from you, or you from me? A question for the philosophers – though it will never reach them: the wind will have it first and it will vanish from me forever, lost somewhere amongst the peaks of the Alps, embedded into tiny, diamond snowflakes, coalescing around the spires of mountains ten thousand feet high and a hundred years away.

You took so much from me, so much I gave – now, will you admit to that? If I make you, yes? If I stare and glare and rage at you, then you will bend and say that I gave you too much that summer? If I am silent, you will say nothing and claim the suffering.

I fed you hope when you craved it most, sweet and rare; I untied the noose around your neck when it pulled tightest, my hand between it and your throat so you could breathe again; I took your hand and together we jumped off the cliff, soaring and flying, tumbling out over the ocean, leaving chalk-and-green fields behind us – for you, I was nothing and everything like myself: pliable and gentle, subtle and harsh, demanding and coaxing and inciting you to fervour and glory.

In turn, you seduced me to the quiet charm, the surety and the lazy drive hidden somewhere in the heart of your village – in your heart – and you seduced me to you, to your mouth and your bed, swearing to me nothing, promising to me nothing except the future.

_We_ , you said then. _We_ , I replied. _We_ , it was when you ran your fingers over the back of my hand, seeing how my breath hitched, and tugged me to your lap with a wanting, cajoling smile.

_Together_ , we said as we breathed together in sharp, halting pants; as we moved together, locked skin-to-skin in a rhythm it would be too painful to stop; _together_ , _together_ , _together_.

Now, in this time, I am the one who is choking, hoisted in the air and chained to the mountainside, abandoned by every man Europe possesses and damned for the crows, for the wind and the rain to claw and tear at, the cold sinking his thin, bitter fingers under my clothes and deep into my bones. There are manacles on my wrists and a slender rope around my neck and I am bound to remain, only remain, and nothing more.

(Amongst this you hover out of sight, a faceless man at the front of a crowd which dots down over the slopes and past the villages, not stopping even at the horizon, a silent, ever-present judge on my sins and my failures.

You say nothing and you show nothing – a shadow of yourself.

When we spoke of the future then we were never so alone, never so helpless; it is ironic, is it not, the way it has all turned out?

Your shadows and burdens and haunting, whispering dreams have passed over to me, and in exchange I have left you with everything – hope and glory and the beauty of freedom, a thousand and one possibilities for each new day.

And still, natürlich, you tell me I have taken more from you than I have given.

Is this now our eternity shared? Lies and refusals and the shades of past emotions lingering on in the backs of our minds, passion and anger, a sadness neither of us will admit to and a sour taste of jealousy and bittersweet affection.

Lemon, I think, ja?)

Some days, I dream that if I push hard enough against the bars of my cell, metal digging into my skin and frost sticking me to it – when I fall back it will tear slowly, bit by bit, and I will scream then as the blood wells and the snow on the windowsill turns pink – and reach up to the sky as a thunderstorm passes through, loud and plodding and violent, my mother’s blood will sing again as it overwhelms my father’s in a swell of passion and recklessness which crashes through the sea wall, and the lightening will run down my fingers in a single bolt, fizzing through my body and jolting me once, twice, so I am alive again.

It will thrill and shiver for moments beyond, crackling under my skin and in the air around me with a heavy, static pressure, and I would light up the sky in return, a flash of sheet lightening in white-gold; a sign, a symbol, a message you might somehow see.

In my prison, the stone will hum with the force of it and the bars will sing, vibrating with the effort, and I will burn myself hollow from the inside out to make you look up and think of me.

Perhaps then I can be saved – when the ridges of the scars I carved into myself long ago blaze red, the skin around them crisping, creeping up in a wave of maroon and orange and charred black, the steps down to Hell will fade from in front of me as each one is consumed, bit by bit, and my screams will ring around the mountains with the howls of wolves, an echo of the utopia I would have damned the world to build.

Salvation would be the balm, water and bandages, once my skin had burned away, my flesh seared and my bones blackened with soot – salvation would remake me, whole and innocent, give to me myself.

Perhaps… but, oh, Albus, I do not know if I believe it any more. What possibility is there for me? What hope is left – what use is left, to beg and cry for a forgiveness no one will ever give me?

I am damned, liebe. Damned and cast out – Hell herself will be my penance, I am resigned to that.

If I am allowed one thing, I hope that before I die, the light blooms behind the clouds, the sun cushioned at their centre with petals of cream and grey and bright bursts of yellow here and there, and they glow, steady and beautifully melancholy.

The air would be thick, ribbed and stuffed with jasmine and lilies, almonds and the bitter, burning tang of absinthe.

Do you remember how, once, we wandered through the gravestones in the churchyard, red and white and purple and yellow petals showering around us as the wind played and danced amongst them, handfuls and handfuls jumping and falling, catching in hair and on coats, down necks and under cravats?

We had laughed, then, as we wound our way through the headstones, past statues of Azazael, scythe in hand, and praying, weeping angels one after another, new ones and old ones, faded and weathered down to lumps of granite, only the traces of names left – we were rainbows in comparison: you in deep violet and I in royal blue, our cravats pastel and soft, orange-edged white and pink. Out-of-place, violently wrong in there: fleet and vibrant and far too wild for such a stiff solemnity.

How rude we were in somewhere so sacrosanct; how deliriously sweet it was when you kissed me over the grave, our fingers tangled on the sign of the Hallows.

It is a fact in life that the most wonderful, sumptuous things are always the most terrible – how it was for you.

Solitude and time, two gifts every man craves and desires more than anything else – always he says, more time, I need more time; always he says, I need to be alone, I need to hear only my thoughts – and yet they set my heart to racing, the blood thudding and pounding inside my head, my thoughts and my voice a scream of thunder, rolling on into the next crash and the next and the next…

They haunt me, you see, and my hunt me, and they will not stop until they have me – caught and trussed, forced to my knees, my mind in shards on the floor, my soul shredded and pieces of me, my memories and my dreams, my once-lauded absolutism, slowly leaking out into a pool of crimson, staining the stone flagons brown.

They follow me, always, and so I run, run down dusty grey corridors, through old, forgotten rooms and down tight, winding, twisting staircases; ash surrounds me, covers everything and I stumble, coughing, wild and desperate and breathless, and scrabble on the ground and run, run again. I run and I run; I run without thinking, without stopping or pausing, without looking behind to see what it is which follows – I run on instinct and that alone.

Things bite at me, nipping at my heels, at my arms as they hit bannisters and handles; sharp, stabbing pains, digging deep and making me whimper.

In the morning, when I wake, they stand at the bars of my window, of my door, silent and watching, and I wonder – is this salvation or damnation?

(To fall and push and forge a way along a road of thorns, shredding my skin with each tiny, twitching movement so that I am fifteen million times scarred by the end of it, fifteen million drops of blood tumbling over and over again so I leave a scattered, crimson trail behind me… the pain and the burden and the unending, boundless tides of guilt which will drown me in seconds the moment the barrier rises even a foot…

Is it worth it, in the name of love? Is it worth it, for myself?

Albus, oh my Albus, I am lost.)

* * *

**A/N** : as before, the chapter title means 'Purgatory' and is taken from Dante's book of the same name - the inspiration for this came from there too. Any references to Ancient Greek gods are not owned by me, and any allegories to Christian religion are not mine either.

Translations:

naturlich - naturally

ja - yes

schatz - dear/darling

liebe - love


	3. Paradiso

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Huj, huj, hajrá!

Paradiso

There is a light that forever burns, Albus; I am submerged in it and in it I see something of you reflected.

It is a riddle: I have no mirror, no glass – they, you, have never allowed me such luxuries: my life is yours, my blood too, and the sweet escape of death is withheld from me at your biding, is it not? After all, what would they care if it died now or then? – but yet, yet I have a reflection, I see reflections skittering across a hundred and one different things, tiny and perfect. They glitter and flash, tantalising and horrifying at once: the remains of a life I once lived and the ashes of a future I once craved – still crave – blended and blown together in a handful of diamond sawdust.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it is merely the last splinters of ice from the winter scattered by the wind across the floor of my cell, but what wonder is there in that?

What need is there in life for wonder… ah, but that would be my question, yes? All those years ago, my hair spun out across your thighs and your fingers lingering on my cheek and the line of my jaw, feather-light and scandalous. It would be my question and your amused, gentle answer, for then wonder was your kingdom, tempered with fire and a guilty bitter tang.

Maybe it is still, maybe I am merely trespassing on what is yours – but how could I? How can something which is yours trespass on what is yours? Wonder and I are both yours; all your dreams in one place, neat and tidy.

You must feel so very satisfied.

(I can see you now: frowning, glancing away, reproach in your voice and melancholy bleeding from your soul in waves, pulsing in time with your heart, off-kilter and weaker, much weaker than you pretend it is.

Albus, my Albus, I know that you are not, I know that you cannot be – remember, I know how you think and what you feel, I know how your mind turns and how the choking swirl of emotions you claim not to have spins and turns, swelling and sinking hour by hour and day by day. I know, I know you – and I know that you know this too, that even after everything we are the only ones who unfailingly, unflinchingly, absolutely understand each other.

There is an irony there, I think, or I misunderstand.

No, do not forget that I know, I understand even now, and so when I pull a string, tugging and teasing it out of your hands and above your head until it pings taut and you jerk and start and stare, remember that.

My red marionette, remember that, ja?)

Ah, but what else is left for me? In this place, I have nothing but my thoughts, dreams and hallucinations in turn spinning out of words and images which flash across my mind, blurry and dim, watercolour works abandoned in the sun for too long. They are a jumble of letters and slices of colour, mixed and mingled so that at times I am remembering nothing and everything all at once.

Did I tell it to you in the end – or did you say it to me? I do not remember clearly: I hear the words in my voice, in your voice, in English and German and scattered, stuttering Hungarian, and I am blissfully, furiously, sobbingly uncertain.

_Ich liebe dich._

Three words, in whichever language; so simple and sweet, they look plain when I write them in my mind, the black ink running a little here and there, smudged as my hand passes over it. They are deceptive, I think – they mean so little in themselves, such a fragile thing, but when spoken, when meant, they can mean everything.

Would it matter if you had said them to me? Does it matter if I said them to you? Should it – should it even matter, forty years on, what we said and did not say, what we should have said and swallowed whole?

Why do I even think on this, long and languid, lingering on this after every other thought has crumbled?

Foolishness and absent, failing curiosity: but you have another explanation, I am sure.

(Oh, the endless contradictions of us, Albus – a list that was always growing, an invisible hand jotting down another thing and another day after day, seemingly without end, without any way to slow down, any way for us to halt it; at the time, we did not want to stop it or block it, we thrived on it, adored facing each other, visors lowered, across the chessboards, manoeuvring ourselves about the board in counter after thrust.

White against black, then we would spin and change, settle into other positions – but always, always we circled each other in everything, and we never quite met.

In the end, that meant more than any three-word, breathless confession in the dead of night, did it not?

In the end, we never stopped arguing to listen.

Albus, oh Albus, we played at contradictions once and never stopped; we argued once, light and free, and never stopped. Instead, we crashed against each other and the world around us burned.)

Would we always have fought, in the end? Would we always have been pitted against each other, generals of opposing forces staring across blood-soaked plains while the innocent screamed around us? Was that future set in stone for us, from the moment we met – that single, tremulous handshake the key in the lock as the door was bolting shut?

Could we have been happy, once, in another world?

It is a foolish question, a naïve and repellent one – I hate that I think on it, I hate that I wonder so much on it, on the thousand and one futures perhaps spirals into my mind, that I fall into whenever I dream, before the memories take hold – but I cannot stop it from returning, day after day after day, to taunt me. It is less painful than other wonderings (could I have been stopped, could I have avoided my own fate, my own hubris… could you have stopped me earlier, could I have chosen another path and abandoned everything, and the final, searing: where did I fall, when did I fall, how did I turn so sharply away from morality and theory into such all-encompassing, drowning death) but still it stings and I am left trembling and exhausted and longing, always, for something to numb it all.

There are some days I think we could have been happy – we could, no? If I had stayed that summer, if you had had less responsibilities and more freedom, perhaps, perhaps we would have remained you and I and nothing else. You would have saved me, if we had – you told me once I saved you, but you did not need me beyond that, did you?

At least, not like I needed you, in the end.

I have thought, you know, about writing, about detailing it all – unravelling my soul in parchment and ink, from the beginning to the end. I will never do it, there is some cold, impulsive fear which grips me, which stays my hand and suffocates the words in my throat when I go to call for a quill, for ink.

You would hate me if you knew it all, and you would hate yourself too, yes, and I cannot, I cannot, Albus, have that. I will not.

You cannot hate me because if you hate me, what am I? What of me is left but hate? And hate dissipates, it burns and it is stifled, slowly but surely, but love and kindness and the gentle growth of understanding, and so it dies.

I do not want to die yet – there is so much more left, so much unfinished and abandoned in me.

(A pile of books arrived the other month – a stack of novels and histories almost as long as my arm – so many of them old, worn classics, titles I remember slipping from your lips, from mine (I mix them up, now, which you spoke of and which I pushed at you over tea and between fierce, laughing debates – does that matter?), others of them more recent, provocative and blazing in their own ways. All of them, each one, is a new copy, though – and that alone makes me wince and twinge and burn in quick succession.

I noticed you included Tante Hilda’s new book – a new updated copy, expanded a little. I have six pages of notes scribbled in the margins, on the inside covers, on the blank pages at the back and the front.

Did you mean, though, to include it? Oh, but you will play dumb on this – do not be so stupid, my Albus, innocence has never suited you, has never been yours to claim, though you spent far too long aspiring to it – you will say you did not mean anything by it, but you did, you did, we both know and all I want is to hear you say it.

Prestuplenie i nakazanie… Crime and Punishment – three little words, but in a flash they had set my blood to beating in my ears, in my head, up through my throat, I could feel nothing but white-hot, molten fury rushing through me, stilling the air as the oxygen vanished, sucked dry by the fire in my belly, the smoke gushing from my mouth like a woken dragon. Then, in that moment, I was reminded of what I had been, reminded of what I once was, had felt, had held in my hands – and then it all crashed, spiralling down in a mockery of a bird, dashing itself to pieces on the rocks as the high of exultation, of fury and glory and power, faded and I was left with the horrors of the aftermath.

You have given me a Bible, you have given me Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and Nietzsche, Wilde and Rousseau, and now you give me this.

I know what game you are playing, and I will not thank you for it – not now, not yet.)

Do you remember, that summer, how we would battle with each other – throwing quotes down like gauntlets, like knives and curses and stones, referencing pages and paragraphs, writers and philosophers? How you and I would sit there, would walk arm-in-arm through the winding, turning paths through the woods and down to the spring where we could hide from the searching, judging glare of the world, how we would twist the phrases and the syllables, the meanings of ideas and ideologies, corrupt the very heart of words themselves so that they said what we wanted, so they meant what we wanted?

Then, it was a game and nothing more – but how quickly and how easily things change. How finally and absolutely.

(I always won, I remember that. I always won in those games, pushing you to silence, tying you up in strings made of your own arguments, your own shattered, stuttering claims – and you would reward me with a kiss, with whispered, adoring compliments.

Perhaps I should have lost, even just once.)

I remember, I think, these days, more about my life in Hungary, when I was no one and nothing except for a woman’s son – born for luck and wealth, they said, with my blonde hair and sea-blue eyes, born for the future – running around the small garden in the shadows of my brothers, pressing my hands against the glass when I was confined inside: too small and too delicate yet to play solider, to play at war and glory.

They cared for me, then, my brothers: they would take me outside and let me sit on the rough-hewn bench father had made one summer out of a fallen tree, and I would watch while they played at swords and knights, calling ‘fight, fight!’ and laughing, delighted and enthralled.

Later, they would shout another chant, in another time, and death would rip it from their throats even as their blood bubbled in their lungs.

_Huj, huj, hajrá!_

Faster, faster, faster – a litany for all pleasures, for all glorious deaths, no? You heard me cry it often enough, as I arched and you gasped, my hands on your shoulders, in your hair, and your arm pressing around my waist, pushing on my hips, urging me to match your desperate, hammering rhythm.

Gellert, you would beg, my name threaded through your breath, and you would run shaking fingers over my mouth, down my neck to press, firm and hotly familiar, on my collarbone. Albus, I would murmur in answer, lost except for you, delirious except for the feel of you – Albus, Albus, Albus.

_Huj, huj, hajrá!_

I remember the muted anger when I found out they were dead – my brothers, my blood and my family – dead in the service of a cause which had not been theirs, a cause they should not have had to fight, in the name of a wrong which should not have happened.

Fate had conspired, then, it seemed, to snuff out the candles which bore their names – theirs and so many others – for nothing, for no one, but the old, rotting pride of philosophies and societies which had long outlived their uses.

Life for theory, for reputation – what a furious tragedy!

Ah, but you will see the irony – the sour irony in it all: I protested and railed against it, I loathed it and I condemned it in every possible way, it repulsed me and horrified me, and then, and then, fate proved herself the victor when she led me, on strings made of spider-silk, slender and cast from steel, down that same worn path, to the same crumbling cliff-edge and off, over the edge.

I strung myself, Albus, it was by my hand and my hand alone that I clasped the cuffs around my wrists and ankles, thin and beautiful, and wedded myself to a destiny I had never quite envisaged – and the curtain rose, the show started, and I did not see the horror until long after the theatre has been razed to the ground, only the foundations left.

I always did have a gift for manipulating people, for spinning and changing and remaking them until they fitted my purpose – I am my own victim and my own perpetrator.

And you… for you, I fashioned a noose out of my own strings, out of the spools left over from my army of marionettes, and I hung it around my neck and trailed the end of it through your hands, daring and challenging, taunting you to create the monster you feared the most.

Others might ask for forgiveness here, might seek it, suppliant and tear-stained, choking on grief; I will not. I cannot.

Albus, oh my Albus, I still dream at night – impossible and strangely, absurdly innocent as it seems – and I lose every ounce of control then; every sin is admitted, every crime confessed, and every wish and damned desire is revealed underneath the muslin I tried to hide them with.

Once, as a child, I visited Köln – the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, the medieval gates, the long main street with its endless shops and stalls and busy, friendly natives – and my father, remembering my mother, remembering my past and my culture (not his, never his. He went to church – to the Lutheran church in the village, but he never took me, even when I begged), took me into the cathedral.

Slowly, dwarfed by the high, curved ceiling, stunned into humble, holistic silence, I walked up the length of the church’s belly alone, my father following like a shadow. I watched everything, drinking it all in: the way the candles played over the old, darkened stone, exposing the rivets carved in the columns, the cracks here and there where time had bitten down and tugged, the sunlight winking and dancing on edges and lines of gold. With every handful of halting, beating steps, stained glass windows would throw a new kaleidoscope across the stone flagons, across the benches and the statues of saints: jigsaws of blue and red, yellow and green and royal, plum purple.

At night I am there again, young again and old again at the same time – my soul is heavy, my head and my heart are scattered in pieces across the floor, red and weeping, but whenever I see my reflection I am myself as I was that summer, before everything started, before I threw myself down the road to Hell.

Then, always, I build and I work – I bring candles, endless rows of them, all of them inscribed with names, names I think I once heard or saw or read, names I recognise, which make me ache and tremble, the tang of smoke and the echo of screams and sobs whispering through the air. On and on, until they circle around the cathedral in banked rows, winding round and round and round in an endless chain, starting and ending with a septet on the alter: two for my brothers, for my mother, my father, for Ariana, for you and for God.

A flick of my wrist, a single, soaring spark and it unfurls from wick to wick like a ribbon stringing itself from pin to pin, a soft butter yellow, rich and sweet, until they are all lit and the heat sucks the moisture from the air and forces me to my knees, tears pooling and spilling from my eyes.

Then, I wake, and I wonder of it, on what it means – and I wish, endlessly, that I could have a wand again, that the shroud which hangs over Nurmengard, pressing on my magic, locking it into my soul, would be lifted, if only, if only for this.

I could carve out the heart of Nurmengard, then, hollow out her bones and carve her flesh away from the skeleton so there is nothing left but the bare, empty shell, and rebuild, remake her in that image: bending the ceilings until they arch just so, growing spires out of the sides, pulling down to make them slim and tall, chipping away at her ribs to leave them lined and worn. A drop of my blood and a lick of saltwater, frozen and expanded into discs – I could shatter them into a thousand and one shards and with them, construct my own mosaics, my own stained glass windows: red and white, exposing the horror and the innocence entwined.

I would have candles, then, candles to place, one by one, my muscles creaking and my bones aching, my breath stuttering and wheezing in my chest, in long, loose spirals around the inside of the church, climbing higher and higher towards the ceiling with each layer, and pressing further and further out until they threaten to swamp me, to surround me so thoroughly that when I light just one, I will burn myself along with them.

It would glitter, a cavern filled with millions of tiny, fallen stars, sparkling and twinkling in every shade of yellow and white and cream possible. The light would be fierce, cold and ethereal, blinding me even as it pulled tears to the surface: tears of pain, of sorrow, of the leaden, hollow numbness of guilt, smoke blossoming in the church, given wings by my screams.   
  
A tomb, in the end - it would kill me, to build it and tend to it and relive it all over and over again - but how else should it end? How else could it have ever ended?   
  
Oh, my Albus, my life is all I have left to give - let me do my penance as you have done yours.


End file.
